


Built On (Buried) Hope

by TorWithoutAnH



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Character Study, M/M, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-09
Updated: 2017-01-09
Packaged: 2018-09-15 16:14:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 722
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9243617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TorWithoutAnH/pseuds/TorWithoutAnH
Summary: To feel anything is to feel pain. You weren't meant to feel again. But you do. It catches you by surprise, the gravitational pull of impossibly wide eyes so full of overwhelming fear and desperate hope. And you feel yourself falling...a Cassian Andor character study on remembering the reasons for rebellion.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Take this as a brief sketch of an idea that got into my head and wouldn't let go.

You weren't meant to feel again.

Numb, callous, you were efficient. The only consequences were abstractions. Achieving or failing objectives. Gaining information or letting it slip away. All for the rebellion.

Always for the rebellion. You poured everything you had into fighting because it was fight or be buried under the weight of your grief. Fight or face your own helplessness. So you buried your grief, you buried your guilt. You buried your fear at what harm could still be done to you and at what brutality you would be capable of in turn. And love, that too rare, too delicate thing, you buried, too. Like scorched earth you harden, and inch by inch, day by day lose a little more of who you used to be like dust scattered to the wind.

You think you will never truly feel alive again, never again feel sweet and gentle things grow from your fractured soul, but you doubt you will live long enough for it to matter.

The fight for justice will surely come at the cost of your life, sooner or later. If you are only a weapon, a tool to be used until it is broken, so be it, you decided. At least a weapon knows nothing of pain.

To feel anything is to feel pain.

You weren't meant to feel again.

But you do.

It catches you by surprise, the gravitational pull of impossibly wide eyes so full of overwhelming fear and desperate hope. And you feel yourself falling.

You have no illusions of his innocence, yet with all you have witnessed, with all you have done, he seems impossibly pure. How can he not have hardened as you did?

He is full of life and full of feeling and it spills and flows out of him like a rushing spring. And before you are even fully aware of what is happening the flood of his feeling rushes over you and seeps in, finding all the cracks in the surface you never knew you had, pouring in to the core of you where somehow your heart still beats.

And suddenly you feel everything again all at once and it hurts, it hurts. Like numb limbs regaining sensation it itches and burns under your skin, overwhelming and confusing and irreconcilable with all you thought you were only yesterday.

All at once you imagine him victim to every horror you have faced and every cruelty you have inflicted and you want to still his trembling hands in your own and you want to be sick from the stain of blood making your hands unworthy to touch him.

He is brave in a way you fear you have never been and will never be. For how can a weapon be brave? A weapon does not feel, a weapon does not disobey orders.

A weapon cannot rebel. You are more than a weapon.

Maybe you were meant to feel again.

You feel a searing rage and a paralyzing terror and above all a bone-deep weariness that you fear you will never shake off until it claims you entire.

But then he smiles at you and he shines like a vision of roses in winter, and you remember what it means to feel alive. And you feel something growing from the depths of your heart, something fierce and tender you had given up for dead.

Love.

Love is the seed of hope, and it does not die, it waits. It waits, taking root in dark and hidden places. And once it is watered, it blooms.

You save him, but you think really he saves you. You trust him though you thought you could never trust anyone. He has faith in you and you want to be worthy of it, to find some small measure of his bravery within yourself, to lay down the weapon and fall into his arms.

And there you find the rebellion you were meant to fight for all along. And you think that the greatest rebellion is never to be made hard by the brutality of your enemies, to always be touched and guided by love.

For rebellions are built on hope, and hope grows from love, if you allow yourself to feel it.

You are ready to feel again.

Your love is a seed that was always waiting to grow.


End file.
